Letter Seven of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is a beautiful summation of two different forms of love: immature love and mature love. As Rilke sees it, in immature love, there’s a merger that happens, a fusion where you don’t know where you end and the other person begins. You see this in new relationships sometimes where one partner says, “I want to do what you want to do,” and you get the sense that they’ve forfeited their own identity somehow. In the letter, this is contrasted with mature love where there’s an ability to be in the self and at the same time be with another. What Fromm calls “standing in love” as opposed to “falling in love’.

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That’s one of the things that The Art of Loving really emphasizes: that to love well, you need to be present.

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We look at parent-infant love; friendship; self-love; love of things (our passions); love between a mentor and a student or the kind of love that can exist in therapy – a kind of loving, holding environment that allows the person to self-actualise. A big part of the class is expanding students’ ideas of what love is and what’s contained inside that concept. Romantic love gets its air time, too.

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. I think our human nature is to love and it’s much larger than just reproducing ourselves.